Kindle Jailbreaking with Winterbreak

Background

I used Winterbreak to have some custom screensavers for my Paperwhite 4 10th gen.

I took the steps described in this guide to install the jailbreak + kual + mrpi + disableota, however, I had some issues I needed to solve.

Issues

xzdec

When trying to install the screensaver hack, I got:

./xzdec: not found

Within the mrpi logs.

I remember finding a forum post (can’t find again!) to install USBnetlite which solved this issue. Just move it to the extensions folder.

If it is still not working, then you might find some luck with

ln -s /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 /lib/ld-linux.so.3

after ssh-ing into the kindle, which I found here.

Screensaver hack

Very easy once the xzdev issue is solved, just follow the guide, or just install the ScreenSavers Hack in to the extensions folder. Just make sure to read the headers and get the install for your kindle, eg: PW4 and not just the first link that crosses your eyes.

For some reason I got an error on install from mrpi but it ended up working anyways. I don’t think python is needed unless you want the additional feature of downloaded book covers of whatever book you were reading.

SSH

SSH-ing to the kindle was a pain. I placed the restriction to never disable airplane on my kindle to avoid even the potential of an automatic update, so I had to use USB.

First, you must go to KUAL -> usbnetlite -> toggle, to enable the ssh interface. Linux should stop recognising the kindle as a storage device at this point.

I used the command:

ip addr

to find the network interface of the kindle (should be something like enp2s0…), then used this guide:

sudo ip link set up dev INTERFACE_NAME
sudo ip address add 192.168.15.201 peer 192.168.15.244 dev INTERFACE_NAME

replacing INTERFACE_NAME with whatever was found in order to setup our usb network.

Then we can finally do:

ssh root@192.168.15.244

However, for some reason, I could not use this root password finder to authenticate. I eventually found some random forum post to find out that my password was simply kindle.

Useful link

I don’t know who notmarek is, but he has a bunch of usefull extensions for the kindle.

TLDR

Bit of a pain, but honestly that’s par for the course. Thank you HackerDude for the jailbreak. 10/10 very well done, but would love these issues to be more easily categorised somehow.

Screensavers

General guide

For the PW4, make sure that they are vertically oriented, ie: width = 1072, height = 1448 (those numbers are engrained in my head btw), and in b/w. I used gimp because that is what I’m comfortable with.

Personal

Here are some images that I created for my kindle (1072x1448):